Paul Horton, a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, is a strong supporter of public education. Surprisingly, the Lab School is private but has a teachers’ union. That is the school where the children of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan were enrolled, as are the children of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Horton here tries to figure out why the Chicago Tribune is so eager to promote vouchers in Chicago and Illinois. The Tribune printed an opinion piece by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal extolling vouchers in his state, though they are so new that they have produced no results as yet, and only 2% of eligible students applied for one, and several of the voucher schools teach creationism and other subjects from a Biblical point of view.
Horton might have added that vouchers have been ineffective wherever they have been tried; not only in Milwaukee, but in Cleveland and D.C. Those who push for them don’t care about evidence. They consider it irrelevant to their ideological crusade.
The Chicago Tribune is Whole Hog on Vouchers
Most hog farmers in the Midwest say that when you go “whole hog” on something there is no turning back.
Many Midwestern farmers also have a hatred of the Chicago Tribune because it has historically represented the interests of the infamous Chicago Board of Trade, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century equivalent of Wall Street in the Midwest.
In the last week, the Tribune, not to be satisfied with “yellow caking” support for the Chicago school shutdowns by rolling out an Augean stable’s worth of misinformation from the Joyce Foundation, is returning to its former unabashed support of speculative free enterprise when it comes to schools.
In the last week, the Tribune has rolled out three pieces on its editorial pages in support of Bobby Jindal and vouchers.
On September 8, the Tribune reprinted an Op-Ed originally published in the Washington Post that called the Obama Department of Justice and the Obama administration out on prosecuting the disparate racial impact of Louisiana’s voucher laws. This piece is hilarious reading that describes the defense of vouchers as the Civil Rights issue of our time that Martin Luther King would have clearly supported. It is almost as though Jindal was channeling King through Michelle Rhee who has recently given such speeches in Birmingham, among other places.
Yesterday, again on the editorial page, a very long human-interest piece (“In Search of an Education”) about a young student looking for a decent education was published. The story, written by a paid libertarian policy wonk from the newly formed Illinois Policy Institute (http://illinoispolicy.org/news/article.asp?ArticleSource=6316), could have been taken straight from a late nineteenth century “Ragged Dick to Horatio Alger” story. A young Chicagoan from a poor Chicago community could not find a decent education within the Chicago Public School system where drop out and college admission rates always fell below fifty per cent even at the best schools available. But this young person, who lives only a few miles from Indiana and the Educational freedom of the most open voucher system in the country, faces a three hour commute every day to get a decent education among students who are more likely to go to college at a private charter.
Of course this article fails to mention that the private charter routinely weeds out students with learning challenges and students with any academic or disciplinary issues.
And the article also fails to mention that the most comprehensive and thorough study ever done on voucher programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin found that there were no appreciable performance differences among public, public charters, and private charters in the city.
Nor did the piece mention that the Board of the Illinois Policy Institute is heavily invested in charter school chains.
Today (Saturday), the lead editorial is “The United States vs. Minority Children.” We can only assume that the piece is written by Paul Weingarten, the Tribune’s Education and Health issues editorial writer, who uncritically published Joyce Foundation polling information this spring that vastly overrepresented the number of white parents of Chicago public school students on the day that the school closing lists were first announced. Prewritten editorials that supported the first were rolled out in the following days, almost as though they had been coordinated with the Mayor’s office and CPS announcements.
You can probably guess what the editorial says. It pretty much repeats what Jindal said about vouchers as a critique of Obama administration’s prosecution of corrupt private charters. There is nothing here about the context of huge Obama and Duncan support of private charters in Louisiana, and, of course, nothing about the stench of incomprehensible levels of corruption in those private charters that smells worse than southern Louisiana paper mills. Indeed, we in Illinois should take heart that there is one state that produces more corruption than we do!
We can expect more of the same in the next few days. Aside from the obvious tack to the right away from identification with Mr. Emanuel and the Obama administration that these editorials represent, the Tribune seems to be trying to steer potential Republican candidates for governor and other state offices away from criticisms of the Common Core Curriculum and loss of local control in Education and more toward a less divisive focus on vouchers. The Illinois Tea Party is all over CCS and loss of local control. These editorials attempt to heal the rift on the right on education.
The Tribune also faces issues with its circulation and income. Because the Sun-Times and local blogs are being read and viewed more in the city because they are more sensitive to communities impacted by the mayor’s draconian education policies, the Tribune is obviously trying to build more circulation in the suburbs and semi-rural areas that might be more sympathetic to harder conservative editorial stances. To do so they must tack harder to the right to compete with the Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
And finally, and most importantly, the Tribune’s publishers are trying to sell their paper to remain solvent. As we know, the Koch brothers could not get the deal that they wanted, or decided that the Tribune was not worth any risk. Potential buyers of the Tribune Company that includes the LA Times include a group lead by Eli Broad, whose foundation has supported school privatization all over the country. The LA Times has published a few pieces critical of the Corporate Education Reform movement. Even though other potential suitors include Warren Buffet, the group that owns The Chicago Sun-Times, and Rupert Murdoch, my money is on the group lead by Eli Broad to buy the Tribune Company.
This might go a long way to explain this new embrace of vouchers by the Tribune, and it would not be too big of a leap to speculate that the Illinois Policy Institute that is feeding the Editorial Board all of the voucher stuff gets a huge chunk of change form the Eli Broad Foundation.
The irony is, of course, that the Broad Foundation is “whole hog” on both voucher’s and Arne Duncan, whose career and policies are defined by the Broad Foundation. Just follow the money and the Democrats and Republicans are no different when it comes to education policy.
Paul Horton is the product of public schools and has spent half of his thirty-year career teaching in public schools. He is a member of AFT Local 2063 of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools that stands in solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union
Hey, the Tribune is not a liberal paper. It has a long history of opposing anything that smacks of being liberal. Was vehemently against the New Deal and Pres. Roosevelt for example. Didn’t want any part of World War 2 until the Japanese attacked us. This latest position is generally in concert with the Trib’s conservative outlook on things.
Of course, The Trib has always represented the interests of LaSalle St. The renewed push for vouchers is new and is suspicious when the paper is up for sale. This is the connection that I was trying to make. I don’t think I suggested that the Trib was a liberal paper.
Good for him. The fact is, vouchers follow “reform”. Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin.
What you’ll find in Illinois is that the “liberal” and Democratic reformers won’t oppose the vouchers because they need GOP support to push charters.
Vouchers poll poorly, the public generally don’t support the idea of public funds going to private schools, so they bring them in after the initial reform push. Illinois will have statewide vouchers w/in 5 years, and you won’t hear a peep out of “liberal” reformers who oppose vouchers, as long as they get charters. I anticipate that vouchers are the next thing liberal reformers capitulate on, actually. They’ve folded on everything else conservatives demanded in “reform.” At this point Duncan and the rest “opposing” vouchers is a little silly. They’ve adopted the entire conservative education agenda. They may as well adopt vouchers too-and they will.
Yellow journalism is just written a bit more tediously in the 21st Century than it was in the 20th…
Paul Horton’s takedown of the Chicago Tribune is a nicely written piece. But the reactionary role of the Chicago Tribune in American politics goes back more than 100 years, so no surprises there. Colonel McCormick was doing McCarthyism as soon as that Communist Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932, and laid the groundwork for McCarthyism a decade before Joe McCarthy put a blot on the name of the state of Wisconsin. And who can forget how the Tribune, during the 1960s, used its direct line to J. Edgar Hoover (a reporter who always got Page One) to slander, among others, Martin Luther King Jr.
Readers need to be reminded, however, that the real danger about the Tribune (and most corporate “news”papers today) comes in their “news” articles. As we’ve seen here, the ways in which editors slants the “news” (from the headlines to inserting those propaganda paragraphs inside articles reported by honest men and women trying just to be reporters) is a major danger.
I have written here and elsewhere on the slanting of “news” in most corporate media, and the special danger of The New York Times. When a story appears as “news” in the Times (and often in regional “newspapers of record” like the Chicago Tribune) it becomes authoritative by definition. One result of that, is that the already fuzzy line of integrity in academic articles (those that are supposed to be “peer reviewed”) fades away completely.
Every day, the Chicago Tribune (and its electronic outlets in radio and TV) is publishing carefully packaged propaganda as “news.” The formula is fairly simple. The reporter is only allowed (or chooses to) quote “sources” that are biased in one direction. My favorite recent New York Times biased “news” story was the front page piece out of Chicago about a month (or two) ago talking about Rahm Emanuel facing the so-called “Pension Crisis.” Of course, the “crisis” was created by those Rahm represents and served, who promised pensions to those of us who worked loyally as public servants, then refused to pay their promised piece, then began propagandizing about the “crisis” they had created. The Times not only ran this Rahmized version of reality on the front page, but published with it a graph that was completely distorting the reality facing teacher pensions in Chicago.
Of course, that wasn’t a first for propaganda appearing on the front page of The Times. That award this century goes to the Judith Miller WMD articles that helped get us into the Iraq War during the reign of George W. Bush. That piece of ongoing “journalism” (Miller reported that story over and over, then to be quoted as authoritative by the crackpots in the White House who had fed her the lies) needs to be written about in U.S. History textbooks right up there with the Hearst papers’ role in provoking the invasion by the USA of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. More than a century ago. That one, if I recall, was called the “Spanish American War” and featured all the same imperialist stuff we’re watching unfold now in a few other countries. Maybe the difference was that McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt were unabashed racist imperialists. Today’s imperialists are more “nuanced” — and even get to share their Nobel Peace prices in the ranks of guys like Henry Kissinger — but the results are the same.
But heck, if Common Core and Race To The Top have their way, American children will never learn enough history to compare Barack Obama and Teddy Roosevelt.
What a calamity it is when a newspaper’s longing for the sensational front-page scoop meets a government’s desire to spread misinformation! And after the incalculable misery, after all the waste of life and national treasure, there are few who remember what brought us to this terrible pass. Good for you, George, for remembering.
Great background George! When Tribune editor Bruce Dold interviewed Barbara Byrd Bennett in an open forum at a major Chicago auditorium, do you think he asked her any substantive questions? The thing was a joke. I have written Bob an e-mail about the Broad Foundation’s involvement in the school shut downs and told him to send it to the paper’s ombudsman. Their Education reporter is now playing nice with BBB. It is pretty obvious that they have been told not to ask BBB or Rahm and tough questions, they just print the propaganda. Do we need to picket or boycott the Trib?
“an Augean stable’s worth of misinformation from the Joyce Foundation”
well said
Since this comment is so late, I doubt that anyone will read it, but I just want to thank Paul Horton for answering a question I had asked under Diane’s September 20th Jindal post. Of course, I know all about The Chicago Tribune’s (I read it so you don’t have to!) political leanings (I’m a lifelong Chicagoan, born & raised), and of course, I know that The Trib. supports Big Business, despises unions and consistently raptures over charter schools and school privatization but, still–who here cares about (or wants to read an editorial by) Bobby Jindal, whose approval ratings might be described as a limbo contest, i.e., how low can you go? I know that Louisiana citizens were hoping against hope that he would have been the veep pick in the last presidential election, just to get him off their backs.